Day 154 Sunday 18th February 2007, Abbottabad to Besham, KKH, Pakistan

After a cold night, nestled in our sleeping bags with a gas fire roaring away threatening us with carbon monoxide asphyxiation, we make an early start in low cloud and imminent drizzle up the KKH. The road is generally OK, not too many painted trucks but slow progress thru towns and villages. We pass thru areas devastated by the Oct 2005 earthquake although avoid the main epicentre about 100km to the east where destruction was almost total. On the KKH there are many towns and villages with destroyed buildings and lots of resettlement camps, some tented and others a bit more substantial. Almost every building seems to have a new tin roof although there are a few still with tarpaulins, and everywhere there are depots, hospitals, offices and projects belong to virtually every NGO from Europe, Japan, Australia and the US. Many of these projects are related to rebuilding skills and human capital rather than just food and shelter. On a cold, damp, grey Sunday morning the places look very forlorn and its a testament to the human spirit that people are busy getting on with their lives after such devastation.

By early afternoon we are thru the earthquake affected areas and heading up the first of the Indus gorges, with the road chiselled out of the sides of the vertical cliffs. However in terms of scariness it just doesn’t cut it with the roads of eastern Tibet, for a start its two trucks wide in most places and the drivers here must be sissies as there are crash barriers. It's also surfaced, although there are a few potholes and there’s a white line (sometimes). We pass numerous signs celebrating the builders and the maintainers of the Highway, mostly army divisions who like to proclaim their contribution with oblisques and monuments. As it's raining quite hard and cloudy we decide to stop at Besham rather than tackle the Indus Gorge proper, which the books suggest is really scary. Its taken us three days to get to the place we were 8km from before we hit the road blockage coming from Swat. We find another rather average hotel and spend the early evening watching movies. We may be in one of the remotest places on earth but that doesn’t mean we cant watch “The Departed” and “The Last King of Scotland” before they open in Sydney.

Distance today 150km; Total distance 22,815km